This is, at minimum, an unconventional view. And it is precisely that reason that David Graeber’s history of debt is so interesting.

While the claims of the impersonal market and the claims of “society” are often juxtaposed – and certainly have had a tendency to jockey back and forth in all sorts of practical ways – they are both ultimately founded on a very similar logic of violence. Neither is this a mere matter of historical origins that can be brushed away as inconsequential: neither states nor markets can exist without the constant threat of force.